Our Mission is to disseminate information to help change attitudes and laws in Japan in order to assure all children of direct, meaningful and continuing contact with both parents, regardless of citizenship, marital status or gender. We want to restore the rights of children in Japan with separated parents, such as in divorce, international parental abduction to Japan, parental kidnapping within Japan and birth out of wedlock. The Japan Children's

Accepted in courts world-wide, PAS is little known in Japan. We now have information available in Japanese that could be submitted to Japanese courts to educate them on what appears to be a growing phenomenon in Japan.

There are a growing number of world citizens who see Japan not as a highly educated harmonious society, but as a haven for international parental abductors. A Japanese spouse living overseas knows that if he or she abducts their child and runs to Japan, they will have access to a court system that refuses to enforce foreign court orders for custody and will grant them custody of an abducted child.

Even the United States, Japan's closest ally, sums up the situation frankly and accurately in several State Department web pages and in a letter to left-behind parents, although it does not get into the issues of visitation, retention and bias against non-Japanese in custody rulings, described below. We urge you to read these United States State Department statements carefully.

In Japan, Possession Equals Custody

It is common knowledge among family lawyers in Japan, that if a husband and wife are undergoing marital strife (since joint custody is illegal outside of marriage), one parent may suddenly grab the children from the family home, run and hide. There are manydocumented cases of this among Japanese as well as international couples. If this parent can hide the children long enough, the Japanese legal system and the family courts will soon support this "retention" on the basis that it has become a "stable environment" and is thus in the "best interests of the child." Family courts even encourage this by not granting visitation while a divorce or custody case is in process, which often takes several years. The court then issues its decision based on this new "stable environment" that excludes one parent, which the court helped to create in the first place. Thus, Japan effectively legalizes parental kidnapping.

Additionally, foreign parents are tremendously disadvantaged because of discrimination under Japan's immigration laws. These laws do not provide a visa to non-custodial foreign parents with children in Japan so that they can continue to legally live and work in Japan. Foreign parents are thus denied the opportunity to live in the same country as their children, and face many additional barriers when seeking visitation with their children and/or pursuing legal actions in Japan.

A final danger is that Japanese Family Courts do not involve trained psychologists, nor do they adequately consider child abuse by a Japanese parent when making child custody decisions. These practices can discourage an abused wife or abused husband from trying to get help, out of fear that the abuser might run away with the children -- and keep them. This endangers the welfare of both Japanese and non-Japanese parents alike.

The poster child for this "uniquely Japanese" practice is none other than ex-Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who as as reported by the Washington Post, LA Times, and elsewhere has denied his ex-wife any contact with their two children in his custody since their divorce many years ago.

This Japan Children's Rights Network Web Site

This web site gives background and explains the issues that make Japan a Haven for Parental Abduction. You can read about the individual issues and the remedies we would like to see, including changes to many current practices in the Japanese Family Court system. This web site is dedicated to helping those affected by the sad state of children's rights in Japan. It provides a way for children to find and contact lost parents. It also serves as a warning to others about what could happen, and how to prepare and fight back in case it does. As such, it should be read by anyone considering marriage to or divorce from a Japanese citizen.

The information on this website concerns a matter of public interest, and is provided for educational and informational purposes only in order to raise public awareness of issues concerning left-behind parents. Unless otherwise indicated, the writers and translators of this website are not lawyers nor professional translators, so be sure to confirm anything important with your own lawyer.